Social media. Should there just be one corporate account? And how much of the population should you be reaching to be a success? One member of the Public Sector Headspace Facebook group decided to map the larger authorities to see who was reaching most people. It's a great piece of work.

We’re helping launch a survey here and download on social media management with MusterPoint. We’d like you to have a copy. We'd like you to win MusterPoint for a year. That's worth up to £14,000. Not bad, eh?

We've come a long way, baby, as country singer Loretta Lynn once sang. Once, the idea of using social media in the public sector was bold and revolutionary. Now it is common place. Perhaps the greatest thing about this is that it puts a human face onto civil servants who are human too.

When I joined the civil service nearly a decade ago, we were in the midst of MySpace, Msn and Friends Reunited (with a sprinkling of the ‘very professional’ LinkedIn). Soon after, Facebook appeared with its open API, Twitter with its own and with fantastic ease you could post or tweet about almost anything.

It’s the beginning of a new year. A time to look forward and set goals for the coming year (if you already did, you might like to change them after reading this blog :-)

It’s 2016 and a lot of local governments appear to think that it’s still 1996. What changes should they realize to get into the 21th century by the end of this year (or century)? Based on my personal experience at local governments in the Netherlands, studies on how cities use social media (UK 2013, around the world 2012) and various interesting books and other literature, I see three major changes local governments must make...

Having been asked to be part of the judging panel for the UnAwards is a real honour for me. Seeing colleagues and fellow comms people work hard in the public sector is always heartening and I'm proud to count myself amongst their number.

The crisis comms category sits comfortably with me as it's where my experiences lie. For once, I want to be comfortable and not challenged - this is something I'm enjoying doing without running on adrenalin, squinting at a screen, getting wet whilst plastic tape flickers in the background and I'm trying desperately to get reception on my mobile. I've had sleep, I've eaten a meal that consists more of a soggy sandwich and countless donuts and I'm ready to go.

However, this made me wonder what a crisis really is and seeing the entrants has done exactly the opposite of what I was looking forward to - challenge me. Or rather, challenge my perceptions of what a crisis is.

Well, I wasn't going to. And I didn't seek it out but the new John Lewis TV ad gives a perfect lesson for where comms is right now.

You may know it. It's a two minute film of a little girl spotting the man on the moon looking sad and sending him a present to cheer him up at Christmas time. An old Oasis b-side has been re-recorded for the music.

Not watching much television I wasn't aware of it. But of course, I remember the penguin TV ad from last year. But I didn't have to watch TV to find out about the new TV ad. It was being discussed on BBC Radio 5 on the way home and all over Twitter.

If I could give you just one piece of advice in looking after a social media profile it’s this: never forget the 80/20 principle.

All the really good social media accounts have it from Asda, a library or a police force. Most of them don’t realise it.

In almost every talk or discussion over the past few years I’ve talked about it.

But what is the 80/20 principle? It’s the balance of doing things with a little variety. It was mentioned in Richard Koch’s book of the same name in the 1990s but in effect is a sharp re-branding from the Pareto Principle from the 19th century Italian management expert Vilfredo Pareto. In this, he noticed that 80 per cent of land was owned by 20 per cent of people. Taking it further, he noticed that 80 per cent of peas came from 20 per cent of plants and his curious mind found the same formula in different places.

Our background is local government comms and lessons there have proved to be transferrable to a whole range of other areas. On Saturday, localgovcamp is staged and we’re shipping in as a supporter. Here’s some things anyone can learn.

So much of what I do comes indirectly from one small event in Birmingham eight years ago.

The event was the first localgovcamp in 2009. More than 100 people turned-up on a Saturday to a converted Mission church which had just been converted into a tech start-up hub. There was no agenda for the day and I only went because a few people I rated from Twitter were going.

The aim of the event was to work out how the web could be used by local government to make the world a better place. Social media was new and we were all busy experimenting with it. IT and most comms teams hadn't even woken up to it all.

Media law. For years it felt largely like an ever constant. But along came social media and all of a sudden things felt dangerously different. Add some law changes and the landscape has tilted somewhat. One issue? Your staff's social media accounts. With media law consultant David Banks we're running workshops. This is a flavour of why.

Just so we're clear, the following are my views alone and do not reflect those of comms2point0.

That's fine then, anything I say on this platform they've given me is my responsibility alone and the good folks at comms2point0 should bear no responsibility for anything I write here.

Here goes. I don't like cake. Not only do I not like cake, I don't like people who like cake. They symbolise all that is wrong with our country, sitting there eating cake when they could be doing something much more useful.

Humanity has lived through the darkest of times, but few events have stained our collective soul more than the Srebrenica genocide. Over 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were systematically murdered in July 1995 during the Balkans conflict – just because of who they were.

The UN described Srebrenica as ‘the worst crime on European soil since the Second World War’.

Lessons learned from the genocide demonstrate how hatred and intolerance can flourish if left unchallenged - even in a country such as Bosnia and Herzegovina where people of different faiths had lived peacefully together for many years, yet an integrated society disintegrated.

Plenty of folks have switched sectors in their careers, and many more follow. In this fascinating post we learn all about the differences, and similarities, in communications in local government and the NHS from one of the best comms pros around.

I’ve been a long time reader and occasional contributor to comms2point0 so it’s a real treat to be guest editing and a genuine honour to be asked.

Having moved to work in a hospital, after spending the last seven years at various councils the thing I’m most commonly asked is what’s the biggest difference? Clearly, that’s about as boring as asking how many times Newcastle United will concede more than four goals this season, but I do see some interesting parallels between the NHS as a whole and the average public sector comms team.

I’ve been thinking for a while that 24-hour Twitter events have driven up a bit of a cul-de-sac.

You know the sort of thing. An organisation tweets what it is doing for 24-hours and shines a light on unsung heroes. You learn things you didn’t know and then the timeline moves on.

Back in 2011, I was part of an award-winning team at Walsall Council that ran this first one in local government called #walsall24. We encouraged teams from across the council from 6am to join in. There was a countryside ranger talking about what she was doing, scheduled road repairs and events at libraries.

There are launches and there are launches. The launch of the UK Government's Communications Plan is worth a look. The Government Communications Service has set some high standards in recent years and how they go about their business should be of interest to everyone involved in the field.

This is our communications plan for the year ahead. It sets out the main campaigns that are designed to help deliver the priorities of the Government and the ways by which we are going to improve our professional practice.

The Government’s One Nation narrative provides a clear focus for our work, providing the framework for Government policies and programmes to help working people, spread opportunity, bring our country together and secure Britain’s place in the world. There will be major campaigns to improve public health, get young people into apprenticeships, encourage the right to buy, recruit to our armed forces and explain pension provision. In total this plan contains 77 communication campaigns, from encouraging blood donation to reducing tax avoidance.

I’ve never felt so naked in a room full of hundreds of strangers. I don’t want to put women off pitching at conferences, in fact Emma Rodgers’ blog inspired me to get up off my seat.

But the reality is, you’re up front alone, with just your idea for a session and a microphone in hand. It could be a great idea, if could be a really bad one. At the point when you see everyone out front staring at you expectantly, that’s the moment you think it’s probably the latter … but it’s too late. You have 30 seconds to sell it.

The #prstack project is something we've blogged about. It's a crowdsourced review of apps and tools that are available for comms people. There has been an ebook published on it. It's worth a look. Here's how one person got involved.

Social media can be great. You reach residents you don't normally connect with. Of course, the flipside of social media is that can you get shouted at in your own time as this heartfelt blog says.

by A Local Government Officer

It’s a Sunday afternoon and I’m working. It’s raining – fair enough – but I still probably shouldn’t be working. I’ve got a toddler who is demanding attention (and some housework that could do with some, too), but instead I’m at my laptop.

I’m working because I’m part of a tiny (reduced) communications team for a council. I am working on a Sunday because if I don’t, I won’t get everything done that needs to be done during a working week. I think this type of working is known as ‘doing more with less’, but I digress.

While I wait to be allowed into the IT system, I pick up my iPhone to check the council’s Twitter account We don’t officially monitor Twitter out of office hours, but in reality, we do. We all check in from home so we can stay on top of any evolving issues and keep in touch with what’s being said to us/about us, at evenings and weekends.

When he’s not leading on social media at the University of Warwick, Dave Musson is a photographer and an avid and active Instagramer, with over 60,000 followers. As Instagram is becoming an increasingly important tool in the 21st century comms pro’s arsenal, we asked Dave to share a few Instatips – here’s part one, which focuses on self-improvement.

Unlike pets, children or colleagues, there’s no shame to be had or relationships to destroy in declaring your favourite social network. For me, it’s Instagram and has been for a long time – it’s incredibly social, it’s made with mobile in mind and it’s a daily source of inspirational photography.

comms2point0.co.uk is a shared learning space, created by – and written for – creative communications professionals. Home to fresh comment, informed opinion, in depth analysis and expert feature articles, comms2point.co.uk inspires and supports communications professionals in the UK, Europe and beyond.